This invention relates to a food molding machine particularly for molding flat patties of ground raw beef and similar tissue containing material that tends to cook to a misshapen form which is believed to be caused by the tissues promoting uneven shrinkage of the patties during cooking.
Thus with many prior molding devices for molding food material of this type the raw patty itself has an attractive and uniform shape and appearance but upon cooking becomes misshapen because of the uneven shrinkage of the tissues of the meat. These problems are particularly acute with raw finely divided, such as ground, beef.
The present invention provides a simple machine or device for avoiding these difficulties in that the resulting patties of raw ground beef, for example, not only shrink substantially uniformly in all directions but also after cooking have almost the same dimensions in all directions as the molded article had before cooking. This means that the resulting cooked article such as the patty is larger than patties molded with prior machines and with the same amount of beef. In fact, experience has shown that larger coverage of the bun with the cooked patty can be obtained even when the patties molded in the devices of this machine contain less than the amount of meat required to give good bun coverage in patties formed by the prior art machines.